Week 13 Blog

Teachers act like designers every time they have a lecture or assign a project.  When they are giving their class a presentation they always have to make sure it is appealing to the students and can hold their attention for a long period of time.  Many times the teachers have to design a worksheet or a project that requires them to start from scratch and design the format and make the seem fun and worth doing to the students. Everything they do they have to think of the student and how it will visually affect  them.  You don't want to present a student with something that would see overpowering and make them not want to do it because it seems to hard.




Sketch up is powered by google and allows you to make a 3-D simulation for virtually anything. This would be good in almost any class. History you could create a model of a city form the past and see what it would look like.  Science it would be a good way to create a a model of habitat for an animal or to make a model for the solar system.  In Agriculture it would be a good way to develop blueprints and then execute them for a grade, and they could see exactly how i would look if they built it. I believe this would be a good way for  students to express themselves and provide them with some hands on learning they desperately need in the classroom.




Digital storytelling is way for anyone to create a story from beginning to end.  They develop ideas for a story and then they analyze them and put them in story form.  They can associate pictures and even music with their story.  The students get to record their stories and then time it with pictures and music.  This is a great way for children to get involved with writing.  Writing is something that teachers struggle with when getting children interested.  This way they have an incentive of making their story and then showing the whole class what they did. 




Using graphing calculators is great way for students to learn how to do complicated problems.  The book says to give them visual aides to help them along.  Calculators are a great way to help them along as well as interactive projectors where they can watch the teacher work out the problem.  There are even handheld calculators that are connected with the Promethean boards that let the students interact together.




I believe it is possible for students to learn how to do something from the TV, but I don't think they could learn to do it correctly or efficiently unless there was someone there to answer their questions and supervise them so that when they try to execute it themselves that they do it correctly. Children need interaction and a way to express the,selves, by simply watching something on the television They are not meeting all of their potential and cannot be expected to actually grasp the information at hand.


References
Jonasse D., Howland J., Marra R. M., & Crismond D. (2008). Meaningful Learning with Technology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Week 11 Blog

   The three most important principles for education, in my opinion are: 1) Practicing principle, the students get more interesting hands on learning so that the information really sinks in and helps them grasp the information.  the second is the discovery principle where the student thinks out the process on their own and figures out how they need to solve the problem.  This helps the student learn the problem solving skills that they will need in the future.  The third principle that I think id the most important of the three is the committed learning principle. This is a longer periods of time where the student has to commit to learning the subject and associating them with things that actually happen in the real world.  All three of these principles I think would help a student to better understand the lesson and grasp the material. 
     Simulations are very useful when teaching a complex lesson, they can help the student to actually understand what is going on.  I think in my Ag class I will use a lot of simulation to help my students grasp the lesson.  When we are welding, woodworking, wiring, or even just learning the parts of an animal I know that it will be key for me to apply ample hands-on experience. Almost everything in my classroom will have a simulation associated with it.
     These three principles go hand and hand with simulations.  They allow the student to actually grasp the lesson and subject at hand in a way that they can understand themselves.  Without using simulations it would be hard for the student to gather information and truly remember and learn the information.  School would be a much harder place for children if we did not use these principles and simulations and we would just be setting our kids up for failure. 


Jonasse D., Howland J., Marra R. M., & Crismond D. (2008). Meaningful Learning with Technology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.